0702 am 'Get This' news

07/02/07 Get This
Chris Andreae

1. Portland’s very own Oregonian had an incendiary little piece on immigration – specifically, on the phenomena of ID theft and the immigrant community. Seems that undocumented workers are shifting from document forgery to ID theft in their effort to obtain employment. Here’s the nut: “Federal authorities attribute the proliferation of fraudulent documents to a rise in multinational criminal organizations” Be afraid…Be very afraid…
2. Meanwhile, one Yaderlin Jimenez finally got her green card. Her husband – also cardless – is missing in Iraq. Mrs. Jimenez herself was about to be missing in America: She was on the verge of being deported but the DHS roused itself at the eleventh hour and issued a stay.
3. Martha Odom brings the Music. Last night Dennis Kucinich spoke at Benson High School. Highpoints included a question from an audience member: ‘What about pressuring Earl Blumenaur to back away from his support of ‘fast track’ trade ratification. Kucinich also admitted to being initially conflicted on the pro-choice issue. He isn’t a serious contender but his is a Dream Platform, too good to stand/too good to fall. Impossible to imagine from where we are at the present moment. All the way back from Montana I asked myself how many decades will it take to restore the Constitution and our civil rights? How many generations will it take and do Americans as a people have the intelligence and the will to pull it off? You have to want it very much to work that hard….
4. Logging Off: US District Judge Ann Aiken granted a temporary restraining order stopping the Deschutes National Forest from selling 190 acres of timber that burned last year in the Black Crater fire outside Sisters.
5. Like Shooting Fish In A Barrel: The House Natural Resources Committee wants to know the extent of Dick Cheney’s involvement in the West’s largest adult salmon kill in history. What they want the VP’s office to tell them is the one about how the water the fish needed was sent instead to irrigators…. (That’s some big-ass fish kill for a guy who says he isn’t even part of the government. On the other hand, there are so few salmon left, Cheney could probably just go out and shoot them, should the farmers need water again this summer….
6. Fire season starts tomorrow.
7. Springfield, Oregon is competing with other Springfields to the site of the premiere of the ‘Simpsons’ movie.
8. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says that even though airports are blowing up in Britain, Americans are “safe”. (DHS will tell you when to panic…so don’t panic…until DHS tells you to…. Until then, just keep shopping…)
9. The top US commander in South Korea – doing fuck-all to ease tensions – says that North Korea is a threat because Krazy Kim just fired off a few more short—range missiles. And this right after telling the world that he was going to invite it in to look at his nukes. (Why does this General believe anything the North tells Americans? What are we, chumps?)
10. Most of the Southern Plains of the US is under water…. (Just keep shopping and don’t think about climate change….)
11. A large swath of Utah is on fire…(Just keep shopping and don’t think about climate change…)
12. The Pentagon is shredding its stock of F-14s rather than holding a garage sale. Buyers had been lining up all the way from Teheran and Pyongyang to snap up Cold War souvenirs and maybe the odd spare part…. But, Sorry, Sale Cancelled due to terrorism. (Actually, the military isn’t shredding the planes. Contractors are doing it. It’s just another way your taxes are funneled into the private sector….)
13. The most recent Harris Poll confirms what we know already: the rest of the world considers America as its greatest threat.
14. Malled: In Iraq a US General is pointing the old iron-fisted finger straight at Iran and Hezbollah. And here we were thinking that the US invasion was to blame for the present chaos and carnage…Well, back to the mall…(And by the way, five more soldiers were killed on the weekend, bringing the death toll to 3,582 and counting…)
15. In Afghanistan, the US is still going about its business of killing civilians. Much to the chagrin of its puppet, Hamid Karzai. It’s getting harder and harder to convince his people that the US means them well and telling them to just keep shopping hasn’t in any way diminished their growing doubts and suspicions…
16. A.Q. Khan – Pakistan’s own Dr. Death – is virtually a free man. (And all set for that big used F-14 sale that the Pentagon just cancelled….)
17. Shell Game: Environmental groups from all over the world are following the money: From Shell’s Sakalin-2 LNG project to international commercial mega-banks where credit runs free and the cash never ends…
18. South African president Thabo Mbeki can’t run for another term but he can remain the leader of the African National Congress…and that’s just what Thabo intends to do.
19. Portugal is prepared to invite Zimbabwe’s incorrigible dictator…. I misspeak, make that president, Robert Mugabe to its big bash – the African/European Summit coming up in December. None of the other participants want Mugabe to attend…but Mugwump Bush goes to the G-8, so…(Note: ‘Mugwump’ comes from the Algonquin word, ‘Muggumwumpa’, meaning ‘war leader.’…hence, Mugwump Bush…)
20. There are still rumblings of an emerging United States of Africa – especially from Libya. But other African nations are taking the old ‘Want & See’.
21. Chinese and Indonesian corporations are planning to develop a Sudanese offshore oil block. Welcome to the Genocide Olympics!
22. Chinese president Hu Jintao says that political reform for Hong Kong must progress in “a gradual and orderly way”. That’s Chinese for ‘Never.’ (Shortly after he made his remarks, the rioting began…)